As a feminist scholar, I emphatically do not support the supression of normal biological functions in anyone, especially in women. But I also have to say that it is a very postmodernist construct to expect that women should menstruate every month of their lives until they reach menopause. In most non-industrial cultures, girls do not reach menarch until they are well into their teens. During the Regency and Victorian periods, most girls in Britain and the US began to menstruate sometime between the ages of 15-17. I believe the average age of menstruation in the US now is around 12.5 years old. In addition, once girls began to menstruate in the 18th and the 19th centuries, they did not have continuous menstrual cycles each month, interrupted only by 2.5 pregnancies, as is now the statistical average in most postindustrialist Western nations. Middle class to upper class women, married in their early twenties (working class women even earlier) and would have been pregnant and nursing for much of their adult lives. Anyone who has read Virginia Woolf's, To the Lighthouse, will notice that Mrs. Ramsay is in her early 50's and she has had 8 children--James being only 6 years old at the onset of the novel. That means that two things were occurring that most teens today would find bizarre--women were still sexually active in middle age and having kids into their late 40's, and many of them would have had very few menstrual cycles in their entire lifetimes. The reality is that constant menstruation from one's preteen years into one's 50's was unheard of until the mid to late 20th century when contraception became readily available, and a diet rich in simple carbohydrates and proteins made it possible for girls to put on enough weight so that they could reach puberty before high school. For most of the time that humans have been around on this planet, females were not undergoing the hundreds of menstrual cycles they now find is de rigeur to experience. So although I am not advocating that we pop a pill to give us fewer and lighter periods per year, we should also consider just how natural and normal it is to menstruate each month from our pre-teen years into our early 50's.